


By Fives

by icarusinstatic



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Alex-centric, Gen, Mild Horror, Mostly Psychological horror, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-15
Updated: 2016-01-15
Packaged: 2018-05-14 04:42:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5729917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarusinstatic/pseuds/icarusinstatic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something has been following Alex Reagan all her life, moving-twisting-filling all the corners of that life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Fives

**Five Minutes**

Alex Reagan was born in the fifth hour of the fifth day of the fifth month of the fifth year of her parents’ marriage. 

She was born five weeks premature. 

When she takes her first gasp of breath in this world the lights in the hospital room flicker and a nurse almost thinks she sees the shadows in the corner of the hospital room move-twist-grow, but when the nurse looks again she doesn’t see anything and decides it must be her imagination playing tricks on her. After all she had just pulled a double shift and shadows don’t move. They just don’t. 

Even so, she couldn’t help but sleep with the lights on that night, certain that something was out there, but not sure what that 'something' could be. 

 

**Five Years**

 

Alex tells her mom about her imaginary friend when she’s five years old. 

Her mom doesn’t think anything of it at first. All children have imaginary friends, don’t they? It’s a healthy part of growing up. 

She starts to change her mind when she picks up little Alex’s crayon drawing of her friend. 

It’s tall and dark and it looks like it has claws dragging almost to the ground. It’s nothing short of hideous. 

When her mom asks little Alex about what she’s drawn, the little girl smiles and says almost proudly, “That’s my friend, Paul, doesn’t he look happy?” 

Maureen Reagan wouldn’t necessarily say that the tall thing with sharp teeth and claws looks happy, more like hungry. 

Maureen carefully puts her daughter’s picture back down on the table and tries very hard not to think about what exactly ‘Paul’ looks like when Alex talks about him - it.

 

**Ten Years**

Alex joins an all-girls soccer league when she’s ten years old. She doesn’t remember this, but it’s also the age when she goes missing for three days. 

She doesn’t remember three days spent in a dark, foreboding cabin, not-quite-alone, but not with company either. 

She absolutely doesn’t remember blood curdled screams from the dark-haired man who grabbed her from the soccer field after her first game of the season. 

Maureen Reagan, doesn't bring up the incident after she finds Alex passed out in an old abandoned Cabin, and she carefully doesn't look into what exactly is watching over her daughter in the dark corners of the cabin. She remembers the old stories her grandmother would tell her, about family spirits, Demons that would stay with families throughout the generations; sometimes they would be friendly and helpful, but sometimes those demons would bring years up on decades upon centuries of bad luck and ill omens to certain family lines.

Maureen isn't certain exactly what this thing she doesn't see (she doesn't) in the corner is, but she hopes with all her heart that it won't stop protecting her baby. 

 

**Fifteen Years**

At fifteen years old Alex has her first heartbreak. She’s long forgotten about her friend Paul, when she hears about the car accident that breaks Jacobs legs. He swears up and down that there was a shadow that darted in front of his car. He won’t look at Alex whenever she comes by the hospital to check on him. In fact, shortly after he’s released from the hospital his family pulls him from school altogether. 

Two weeks later, his family has moved out of town completely. 

Jacob has nightmares for weeks. He can't get the image of a tall dark shape with suspiciously long fingers that darted in front of his car that night, right before he swerved out of the way to miss it and slammed into a light pole. 

Jacob doesn't talk to his parents about the nightmares, and they don't ask. But sometimes he will wonder at the whispered conversations behind closed doors, and the abrupt silence whenever he enters a room.

Jacob Ashbury doesn't see Alex again, nor does he really think about her until ten years later when he's listening to his long time ex talking about a tall shadow and the child who seems to be haunted by it. 

 

**Twenty Years**

Alex drops cake onto Nic Silver’s lap when she’s twenty years old. And she makes her first life-long friend in the process. 

Nic Silver is a tall lanky boy verging on man. In fact, he's the tallest member of the newly founded Radio Appreciation Society that's holding it's first meeting in the basement of the University of Washington's library. 

Nic is newly transferred to Washington State, coming into the fall term of his junior year. He doesn't know very many people, but as soon as his communications professor reads his assignment on Edward R. Murrow, she'd suggested that Nic might like to check out the radio Appreciation society. 

"They're new, and not the first radio club on campus, but they have some ideas that I think you'd be interested in." Dr. Mason had told him, smiling as she handed Nic back his paper, an A cheerfully scrawled on top. 

Nic had smiled and promised to look into it, but right now, sitting with cake splattered across the front of his shirt, and on his lap, Nic is seriously beginning to regret that choice. It doesn't help, that there's a beautiful, but mortified girl tripping over her own words trying to apologize while ineffectively dabbing at the front of Nic's shirt with tissues. 

"I am so sorry," She says, eyes looking anywhere but at Nic's face, like she just can't bear to look at him. "I didn't see you there, and then I just got fumble fingered and I am sooo sorr-"

"It's okay," Nic cheerfully cuts the girl off. He doesn't like to see anyone get so frazzled talking to him, and "it's only cake. I would have hated to see what those chicken wings over there would have done," Nic points to the makeshift Buffett table in the corner of the room, with some very questionable looking chicken wings looking forlorn and uneaten.

The girl looks over and grimaces when she notices what Nic was talking about. "I would stay far far away from those wings if I were you. Danny DiMarco brings them in every week, and every week someone makes the mistake of eating them." The girl wrinkles her nose, and Nic is positive that she's speaking from experience. "Believe me, you would be better off without those things in your life. 

Nic tries and fails to stifle a snort of laughter, and is relieved when the girl only smiles in response. 

"I'm Alex, by the way," the girl-Alex says a hint of a smile still on her face, and Nic wouldn't be surprised if she usually looked like that, happy, but wary. "And I promise if you stick around for the rest of the meeting, I'll keep you safe from projectile cake and chicken wings."

"Nic, and it's a pleasure to meet you. Believe me, having cake dropped on me is the least of what's happened to me today." Nic takes Alex's outstretched hand giving it a quick squeeze, and is only mildly surprised when he gets a firm one in return. 

"Oh?" Alex says as she takes a seat next to him, looking as Nic's frosting splattered shirt up and down in bemusement.

"Yeah, have you ever taken Professor Durmond's Psych 301 class?" Nic doesn't even wait for a response, just barrels on ahead. "Well, today he got the bright idea that we needed to have an in depth discussion on the history of lobotomies and let me tell you, I did not sign up for that. I'm not even a psych major, for gods sake. I don't even know why I signed up for this hell."

By the end of it Nic knew he'd gotten a little too worked up about things, but he was surprised by Alex's stifled laugh.

"I actually took that class last spring, I know what you mean. Durmond gets a little excitable about everything. It's uh... It's an experience." By the way Alex is carefully wrinkling her nose, Nic can tell that he's got a lot to look forward to in his psych class, and he is definitely not. 

Nic and Alex keep talking throughout the rest of the evening, the meeting having dissolved into chaos after somehow the table with the chicken wings mysteriously gets tipped over, with no one having been around it at the time. 

Neither Alex, nor Nic noticed the ever present shadow in the corner of the room retreating more and more the longer Alex talked to Nic with a smile on her face. 

In the coming years that shadow would stay mostly gone, only coming out little by little every time Alex was snubbed, or derided by one of her first bosses, or once when her date stood her up, but it would never fully emerge for another five years when Alex first meets a young boy named Sebastian. 

**Twenty Five Years**

Alex finally remembers her imaginary friend Paul while she’s standing in an empty cabin with a psychic who can’t stand to look at her, certain that ‘he’s coming while equally certain that whoever ‘he’ is Alex has probably already met him. ' 

(Alex couldn't be more wrong about that, but she doesn't need to know that, not yet.)

She thinks of the dark smudge in the back of a child's closet that Sebastian's mother had showed her, and then she thinks of the children's drawings, her own drawings that her mother had shown her a Sunday not too long ago.

Alex remembers her old imaginary friend, but she doesn't remember what he looked like, only that his name had been Paul, and that while she should have been afraid of the things that Maria Rodriguez had shown her, Alex had been oddly comforted. Like she was rediscovering an old long forgotten toy, something she had loved and missed, and childishly forgotten about.

It isn't until later that night, after Alex had written down her experiences with Tannis Braun and had a quick dinner with Dr. Strand, that she pulled out her phone and brought up a picture that she had scanned into her phone of one of her childhood drawings, the one that her mother had insisted that Alex at least take with her, along with a small medallion that now rested on a necklace around Alex's neck. 

The picture was a child's drawing, and Alex had never really been the best of artists. Usually the best she had ever managed was poorly drawn stick figures, and lopsided trees. This picture however, this one was not in Alex's usual style, and she was uncomfortably reminded of a young boy in a mental institution in Idaho. She remembers how his drawings had mostly been in one style, but that at one point, he had drawn (but not drawn) arithmetic equations, something that he had no memory of drawing before. 

The drawing on the phone is much, much more detailed than anything Alex had ever drawn before. It's got a house... Something that looks eerily like the cabin that she had visited earlier in the afternoon, and in front of the house, was a figure that Alex could distinctly recognize as herself. The figure was short with hair in the pigtails that Alex had been so fond of when she was younger. It's what is next to the drawing of herself that really gives Alex pause. 

It's abnormally tall, that's the first thing that jumps out at Alex; almost as tall as the cabin. And it has long arms... Much longer proportionally than would be normal for a human, they almost touch the ground. But what really gets to Alex is the oddly cheerful smile on the things face, it looks happy, and the Alex in the drawing looks happy to see it.

Alex looks at the picture for a few more seconds, before she has to put it away, too frightened of things she almost remembers.

She's quiet for a moment looking at the phone in her hands, before Alex realizes that she's not quite as alone as she thought she was.

There's something moving-growing-twisting in the corner of her room, it's as if the shadows were alive, clawing their way up to the ceiling. 

She should be scared, Alex knows she should be, but for some reason, Alex feels safe. Safer than she has since before she met Dr. Richard Strand and started her investigation into his black tapes. 

Alex can't be sure but... "Paul?"

The shadows in the corner of her room move-twist-grow in approval.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> Big thank you to @the-wonderful-jinx on tumblr (and AO3) for helping to inspire me to finish this story with your meta and TBTP thoughts.


End file.
